State Dept. asks court to reject Republican Party FOIA request for Clinton emails

A request for emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been challenged.

Lawyers at the U.S. Department of State have filed a motion for summary judgment with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asking it to deny a Republican National Committee (RNC) Freedom of Information Act request for more than one million pieces of electronic communication from Hillary Clinton and her top aides.

The State Department said in the brief that the RNC request – for what amounts to about 1.5 million pages of email – places an undue burden on the State Department to compile and redact sensitive information from every email sent to and from former Clinton State Department aides Jacob Sullivan, Cheryl Mills, Patrick Kennedy and Bryan Pagliano over a four-year period, as well as text and BlackBerry Messenger messages sent to or from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"Freeing the State Department from this burden will prevent it from having to process these requests for generations or draw resources from its core mission of conducting American diplomacy – and it will permit the Department to focus on scores of other more reasonable FOIA requests,” the State Department said in the brief.

The State Department also noted it would be unable to supply the requested BlackBerry communications because as secretary of state, Clinton was never issued a government BlackBerry and the 54,000 emails she already provided from her private email server did not contain any from a BlackBerry device.

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